Posted on September 30, 2026
I’m Roei, Amitei Bronfman 2014. I’m 29, married with one daughter and another on the way. Over the past few years I’ve taught in middle school, written a children’s book, and built a sock business with my wife called Groovim. Two years ago we moved from Jerusalem to Eshchar, a mixed religious and secular community in northern Israel.
How are you experiencing the current situation?
Reserve duty has been pretty exhausting, and on Sunday I’m heading out for another round. We’re trying to figure out how to manage it this time. It feels different now: Adi, my wife, is pregnant, and Libi, our three-year-old, is asking smarter, harder questions. A lot of people in Eshchar are away in the reserves, so we lean on each other here in the community. And at the end of the day, we’re grateful things here aren’t as hard as they are for people farther north, near the border. I really can’t complain.
Tell us about Groovim.
About six years ago my wife and I decided we wanted to create something together, make something that’s ours. I have a little bit of background in design, so we went through all kinds of ideas until we said, let’s make socks. We found a small, family-owned factory in the Lower Galilee, in the Muslim Arab village of Kaukab Abu al-Hija – one of the last textile factories left in Israel. That’s how I met Yusuf, the owner, who has since become a very dear friend. We quickly realized there’s a story here – a local story – that we want to be a part of. We also realized that, more than just cute socks with generic pineapples and bananas, we had an opportunity to tell a story. An Israeli story. That’s how Groovim started.
(The name is a play on “groovy” and gerev, Hebrew for “sock” – Groovim literally means “wearing socks.”)
What is the Israeli story to you?
We’re a nation of storytellers, and stories are what really holds us together. Jews have survived thousands of years thanks to stories. Whether it’s something nostalgic and Zionist, or something straight out of Israeli daily life. Take the socks we made with Keter chairs – those white plastic ones that stack up. That image holds so much. People connect to it from all kinds of directions. But everyone who sees it says: wow, that’s so Israeli.
I have a particular soft spot for the Golda sock. She was the first in our “National Icons” series, and there was something about making that one… suddenly I understood something about Groovim I hadn’t before. There was a chutzpah to it that got a reaction out of people. Everyone has an opinion about it – either that it’s amazing, or that it’s a disgrace to put Golda Meir’s face on a sock. But the Golda sock was the one that showed me we could actually say something.
I’m always very cautious about what we say, though – sometimes maybe a little too cautious. It matters to me that Groovim is something everyone can relate to, that it tells the story of all Israelis. So I try to keep my own politics out of it. We constantly get comments like “why don’t you do one of Bibi?” or “you have to do one with Rabin” – and honestly, those are corners I’m a little afraid to go into. Politics, especially here in Israel, is too explosive. In that sense, the “National Icons”, whether or not everybody agrees with them, are actually very unifying. It’s important to us to stay within that consensus, to keep telling the story of what we share as Israelis – not of what divides us.
Against the backdrop of the politics, the polarization, the war – making socks feel like a surprising choice.
I learned something during the war about Groovim and about optimism. I’ve had several TV and radio stations approach me, wanting me to talk about the hardship of running a business alongside reserve duty. Every question steered toward “tell us about how you’re falling apart, how the business is failing, how hard it is to live here.” At some point I told one interviewer that I believe it’ll be okay. Sure, running a business from reserve duty isn’t ideal, but honestly, we’re fine. She asked how I could be so optimistic, and I said: listen, I sell colorful socks. I don’t know how you can sell colorful socks and be a pessimist. If you sell colorful socks, you have to tell people things here can get better.
I look at the politics and polarization, and I think the only way forward is through connections between people – the kind that aren’t about politics at all, but about our shared DNA. Just as an example, we’re about to release socks with “Shabbat Shalom” stickers on them – you know, the ones grandmothers send on WhatsApp before Shabbat. Everyone knows them, whether you’re left or right, it doesn’t matter. It just makes you laugh, because it happens in every WhatsApp group. When two people laugh at the same thing, it creates that connection of “hey, I know that feeling too.” I think that’s exactly what we need right now.
Where do you encounter that in your own life?
First of all, in the community I live in. Eshchar is a mixed religious-secular community, and people here are genuinely different from one another. That’s exactly why we chose to live here. I think the home I grew up in was like that too. I grew up in Oranit, near Rosh HaAyin. We were religious, but my father refused to live in the religious neighborhood – he always said he didn’t want to live in a ghetto. Our parents raised us to believe everyone has to find their own place. I have one sister who’s lived in New York for over a decade, and another who lives in the West Bank and leads a fully religious life. We love each other very much and are very close, and it doesn’t matter to us at all who each of us votes for.
If I want to experience any real depth, I have to meet people I perceive as different from me. That’s the only way to expand the range of what you experience within yourself. Like at Bronfman. Otherwise, you’re just living with yourself – an echo chamber.
The partnership with Yusuf makes me think about this too, about what connects us and what separates us. Last June, Yusuf’s nephew was killed in an accident. A twelve-year-old boy – he looked so sweet in the photos – fell off a horse and died. I went to the funeral, and I found myself thinking about how different it would look if this had happened in Jewish society: how much noise the media would make around a tragedy like that, how many people would carry it with them. There were a few headlines in the papers, but then the world just carried on as usual. It really made me think about how much we live in two separate societies. It’s hard.
But alongside that, there are surprising moments too. One day I came back from reserve duty and had to go straight to the factory. I’d meant to change out of uniform first – I felt uneasy about walking into the village dressed like that, I wasn’t sure how it would land. But I couldn’t find anywhere to change, and I ended up staying in uniform. On the way home I stopped for falafel in the village. The guy behind the counter saw the uniform and gave me falafel and a drink, on the house. It was a genuinely lovely moment. In my head I’d imagined I would be seen completely differently, and instead I was pleasantly surprised.
That’s also the Israeli story. All these surprising moments that happen when you’re living inside this friction. Looking in from the outside, it’s easy to assume one thing, but when you’re actually in it, rubbing shoulders with people every day, you suddenly discover something else.
